Action Research On Duty Report In Spoken English Course: A Constructivist Perspective

Recently, greater emphases have been put on reforming the English teaching at various levels in China. The new edition of the syllabus for middle school and college English teaching have elevated the position of cultivating students' applied competence, especially oral English proficiency to an unprecedented high level. As regards teaching mode, the syllabus requires teachers to apply computer, network and multimedia technology to the implementation of autonomous English teaching and learning. On the other hand, the students, esp. the newly-enrolled college students have a higher level of English. They have higher expectations for improving their oral English. As far as the teaching environment is concerned, Internet and digital products like computer and MP3 player have played increasingly important roles in college oral English teaching. Judging from the teaching and learning theory, constructivism is being highly valued in college English teaching. Seen from the teaching research mode, action research starts to gain wide attention from English teachers in China. Yet when I survey the English teaching research in China, few action researches are done on oral English teaching from the constructivist perspective.It is the author/researcher's wish to try a new path: integrating constructivism and action research to examine the effects of duty report, one of the most commonly-seen activities in oral English classes in China, in a bid to find a way of bettering this activity. The research is carried out in the 18-week fall term of 2006. The subjects are 46 students in Class I of Grade 2005 in the College of Aerospace and Materials Engineering in National University of Defense Technology. Through the observation and piloting questionnaire after the first two weeks, the researcher decides to carry out duty report in the class. The duty report activity is divided into two phases. The first phase is between Week 3 and Week 9, during which no forms and topics are pre-set for the duty reports and they are totally volunteer-based. In Week 10, a questionnaire on the effects of the duty reports in phase one and the first interview are administered to the students. In the light of the feedback collected from the questionnaire and the interview, the researcher timely adjust the content and form of the duty reports to be carried out during Week 11-17 (phase two). Major adjustment measures include: presenting reports with PowerPoint or audio-video files, adopting more group reports requiring collaboration, pre-setting the topics to be reported, assigning the tasks to certain individual/groups in advance, integrating the self-assessment, peer assessment and teacher assessment, and paying more attention to the interactions between reporters and audience. In Week 18, another questionnaire and the second interview are carried out to collect the feedback on the effects of the duty reports in phase two. During the whole term, the researcher invites three veteran professors and experts to the classroom to observe the duty report activity. During the action research, the researcher keeps teaching log and reflective thoughts for the duty reports of every student. Moreover, the students are told to write learning log and reflections from Week 3 till Week 17 on their respective duty reports. All these logs are collected and analyzed in Week 18.The researcher uses SPSS 13.0 to analyze the questionnaire data and transcribes some videoed duty report, assembles and induces qualitative data from interviews, learning logs, teaching log, and observation comments from the veteran professors and experts. After synthesizing the various data, the research finds that duty report is conducive for improving the metacognitive, cognitive and affect factors of the students. It enhances the students' motivation and interests, fosters their autonomous learning ability and team spirits, and lays theoretical and practical foundations for their future independent learning of oral English. The students have preliminarily formed the habit of reflecting upon their own duty reports which is favorable for improving their future presentations. Through carrying out action research and writing the teaching log, the researcher better understands the problems of the students and reflects upon his own teaching practice so as to improve his future teaching. The teacher also gets refreshed and becomes more confident after finishing the action research. The research does bring us some implication too. If the teacher can't skillfully organize, design, and assess the duty reports, if he only relies on some active students' enthusiasm and volunteering for duty reports, and if he only carries out duty report just for enlivening the atmosphere and ignores the improvement of language performance, then duty reports wouldn't be warmly received by the students. And students' participation desire would be greatly diminished. Duty reports would turn into a type of flashy but meaningless activity. The research shows that well-planned, grouped, challenging, pre-assigned, and teacher-intervened duty reports are more effective and more warmly welcomed by the students than are the laissez-faire ones. The former reflects the essence of constructivist learning theory: situation, collaboration, discourse and construction of meaning.